Apple fails to exploit Vista’s shortcomings with delayed Leopard release
The launch of a new version of Max OS, codenamed Leopard, off the back of average Vista sales, looked like an opportunity for Apple to finally attract more consumers and businesses to the Mac world. Unfortunately, it now seems that by delaying the release of Leopard release, Apple may have squandered any potential advantage offered by Vista ’s struggle to gain momentum.
While Microsoft has on a number of occasions reported that Vista sales are strong, higher than expected, and that Vista is doing much better than XP did when it was launched, there seems to be strong evidence that Vista is struggling to gain momentum in corporate world.
InformationWeek Research, in a recently conducted survey, said, “You have to read the fine print to get the full, and less impressive, picture” of Vista ’s deployment rate on businesses.
The survey, completed on online by 612 business technology professionals in March and April, found that 25% of the respondents had already begun deployment of Vista, and among those early adopters, 91% have installed Vista on 10% or fewer of their PCs.
In addition to the 25% of survey respondents who have already begun the move, only 17% plan to install Vista over the next 12 months. For 58% of respondents, Vista is more than a year away or not on their to-do list at all. Why aren’t they moving faster?
One key finding of the survey was that Vista is falling short of expectations among a surprisingly high percentage (46%) of business technology pros. Only 19% said it’s meeting expectations, while an oddball 1% grade Vista as “exceeding expectationsâ€.
Another survey, conducted by CDW Corporation, found that “the top five reasons for not adopting Vista were the expectation of bugs in the first release, satisfaction with a current operating system, unclear benefits from upgrading, concerns about hardware requirements, and lack of IT staff.” This survey was conducted among businesses, state/local government agencies, K-12 education and higher-education institutions — 753 IT decision makers responded.
Rather than try to exploit Vista ’s shortcomings by getting Leopard OS X out on time, Apple said it would delay the release of its new operating system because it had to devote more resources to the iPhone.
Some commentators are not convinced with the reasons given for the delay. Some say Apple delayed the next generation of Mac OS X to give developers a head start on porting existing software, as well as developing new software for the new user interface. Others say that Apple delayed Leopard so that it would not compete with the iPhone for media attention.
But Apple CEO Steve Jobs says that while the decision to delay Leopard is not popular with some people, he believes it was the right one to make.
Perhaps Apple was right to delay Leopard. But such a delay gives its archrival Microsoft extra time to sort Vista’s shortcomings, and to convince computer buyers that Vista is the best option. It seems that Apple has squandered any potential advantage offered by Vista ’s shortcomings.
See the related story – Microsoft’s Vista fails to stop Apple Mac OS popularity.
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May 16th, 2007
Being both a PC and Mac consultant, Apple may have missed a window of opportunity here, but with some exceptions, Vista mainly catches up only with Tiger. XP’s rollout was much smoother, despite lack of things like modem drivers at the time. Hardware issues, driver issues, license and activation policies, multi-user and other security policies and more make Vista a much more complicated rollout in a business environment. I have watched users and administrators alike, fumble around with the interface changes from XP. I find it amusing how users open an Explorer window to look for files and have difficulty at first, navigating downward to the computer icon.
For the first quarter, a large number of people have not been disuaded from purchasing Tiger with the upgrade to Leopard in the near future, since it’s stable and robust, with less security and virus issues than Vista has already shown itself vulnerable to. When it does finally come out, I don’t think it’s going to get the same lukewarm reception that Vista did.